Propaganda Alert!! The key lesson of the BP oil spill? Don't panic

 

Spiked's prediction that this was not 'the worst environmental disaster' in US history has been proven right. Over the past few days, it has become increasingly clear that the worst of the BP Gulf oil spill is now over. The accident on the Deepwater Horizon in April was a very serious one, causing the deaths of 11 workers and costing billions of dollars to clean up, work which will continue for some time to come. But as spiked predicted, the accident and its aftermath has simply not lived up to its billing by President Barack Obama as 'the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced'. The first lesson we should learn is that modern society has a capacity to fear the worst. In the early days after the accident, we were promised that the beaches of the southern US would be painted black by thick crude oil, that fisheries would be wrecked for years and the tourism industry destroyed. Yet there were always good reasons to believe that these things would not happen: the oil was being blasted out of a torn pipe one mile deep and 50 miles offshore in warm waters. A combination of natural dispersal, evaporation and bacterial decomposition meant that a lot of oil would never make it ashore. Also, the use of boons to block the oil, chemical dispersants and oil-skimming vessels helped to ensure that only a small fraction of the original leak made it to dry land. Nor has there been the wildlife armageddon that many predicted. As a recent article in Time magazine notes, the teams looking for dead birds 'have collected nearly 3,000... but fewer than half of them were visibly oiled; some may have died from eating oil-contaminated food, but others may have simply died naturally at a time when the Gulf happened to be crawling with carcass seekers'. That would appear to be less than one per cent of the number killed when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989. The number of dolphins found in the aftermath of the current crisis has been low, too: just three have been found dead and visibly oiled.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/213046-Propaganda-Alert-The-key-lesson-of-the-BP-oil-spill-Don-t-panic